The Painter of Shanghai (21 page)

‘It’s never been a question of payment,’ he says sharply, even though it’s always a question of payment. And this (she thinks) only proves it further. If only he’d let them pay him off, and paid Godmother what she’d asked. If only they’d both paid more attention to the signs; to fate. To how life is lived in Wuhu, rather than how they wanted to live it.

‘Yuliang?’

She lowers her eyes. ‘You shouldn’t waste worry on me,’ she says quietly. ‘I’ll be safe.’

He frowns. ‘Safe? Where?’

‘Wherever I end up.’

‘Don’t be foolish,’ he snaps. ‘You’re not leaving. Where will you go? Back to the Hall?’ And, when she shakes her head, ‘Back to your uncle?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘He is not. He’s in jail.’ Yuliang, still fidgeting with her broken pencil, jerks her head up. ‘The Zhenjiang authorities locked him up last year,’ Zanhua continues. ‘He hadn’t paid taxes in a decade. Don’t look at me like that. You didn’t think I wouldn’t make inquiries?’ He turns away, starts pacing. ‘I’ve promised that I won’t lie to you, ever. But you also can’t lie to me, Yuliang. Not if we’re going to do this.’

‘Do what?’

‘Get married.’ He annunciates it very slowly. ‘I can’t think of anything else to do that will clear your name and shut them up enough for me to get on with my job.’

She stares at him, open-mouthed. ‘Married,’ she repeats.

‘Officially it can’t be a real marriage, of course. But a public ceremony. Something symbolic. My friend Chen Duxiu, the one I told you of, is coming back from Japan briefly. He can witness.’

A concubine,
she thinks.
I will become an official’s concubine.
What was it her mother used to say about concubines?
A home’s wife is its kitchen, where a home’s good things live. A concubine is nothing more than the storage room.

‘It will save face,’ he is continuing. ‘It doesn’t need to be much – just an exchange of vows in public. We can send an announcement to the
Crystal
and the other papers. Everyone up there has a little wife – or two, or three. Even though they all voted for the monogamy laws.’ He taps a finger against his chin. ‘Attorney Wen will draw up the contract.’

An image comes: her uncle, Zheng
niangyi
. Yuliang’s sale papers in hand. ‘No,’ she says, sharply. ‘No contract.’

He gives her an odd look. ‘But you will do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Marry me.’ And she stares: ‘You know that I love you.’

It’s the first time a man – any man – has said it to her – at least, out of bed. The first time anyone has meant it – truly meant it – since her mama. Yet as Yuliang shapes her mouth to say the words back to him, she finds her thoughts drifting to his wife in Tongcheng.
Never a true marriage
, he had said.

What comes out is this: ‘Will – will we live in Tongcheng?’

For a moment disappointment, and perhaps something more raw, shades his features. ‘No. Not at first, anyway. But you can’t stay here either. I’m sending you to Shanghai.’

Shanghai.
Yuliang rubs a pencil shard against her arm. It leaves a rough pink line in its wake.

‘Tell me,’ he says stiffly, ‘does that sound all right to you?’ He is organizing his papers now. But she knows without looking that he’s still waiting for her to say it:
I love you too. You’ve made me happier than I ever thought possible.

So why can’t she?

It’s true, after all – she does love him. Yuliang knows it with the same detached certainty with which she knows that the sky is black and not blue, that the universe is unlimited and unfathomable. And yet somehow she can’t force the words free.

Instead she stands, and holds her arms out to him. Her little sketch is dry now. The paper waves in a draft.

‘It sounds wonderful,’ she says. And then: ‘Do you like the butterflies? They’re for you.’

PART FIVE
The House

The Territorie is an even Playne, and so cultivated that they
seeme a Citie of Gardens, full also of Villages, Hamlets, Towers.
There are many good wits and Students, a good Ayre, and they
live long, eightie, ninetie, and a hundred years.

Father Matteo Ricci

(describing Shanghai, c. 1610)

17. Shanghai, 1916

Yuliang has just drifted to sleep when a splash and a shout jolt her back into awareness – just in time for a near-collision with a Shanghai garbage barge.

‘Out of the way, dog-face!’ their sampan’s captain shouts. ‘Your steering stinks as much as your cargo!’ He gestures obscenely, then darts a look at Yuliang. ‘Sorry, madame. There it is, then.’ He points. ‘The great city.’

Yuliang shades her eyes. At first Shanghai is little more than twinkling color and tone, a distant blur of smoke and stone and lush green. But as their craft draws closer the horizon melts into clarity, revealing a shoreline so sparklingly alien she draws her breath.

‘The Bund,’ Zanhua pronounces, the word as hard as a piece of metal in his mouth.

‘Bund,’ she repeats obediently. ‘Is that French?’

‘Indian, I think. It means “gathering place.”’

‘That’s strange. To name a Chinese place with a foreign word.’

He laughs. ‘Wait until you see the city. Half the street names are French or English. And in some neighborhoods, half the people as well.’ He smiles. ‘It will be like living overseas.’

The thought is by turns unsettling and thrilling: Yuliang has spoken with only a handful of foreigners in her life. She’s trying to summon the few French or English words
she knows (
dah-ling
, she mouths;
howareyou, j’taime)
as he points to another building. ‘That’s the British customs house. More money in its coffers than in all of Wuhu’s offices put together. And over there – see the bamboo scaffolding? – is the new Russo-Asiatic Bank. They say it will be splendid.’ He squints, redirects his finger. ‘Over in that direction are fine hotels. Jews built them. They say scandalous parties take place there.’

Yuliang looks at him quickly, wondering both what Jews are and what is considered scandalous in Shanghai. She can only hope the definition is significantly more expansive than the one that led to their subdued nuptials last month.

As a ceremony, it was a far cry from the one Yuliang’s mama had dreamed of: there was no red dress, no sedan chair, no stepping over the
an
saddle on the threshold of the groom’s house. No ‘tumult in the bridal room.’ There was, instead, a simple exchange of vows – written by Zanhua and his friend Duxiu – at the banquet hall at which they’d first met. Chen Duxiu, an elegant young man with sharp features and a quick tongue, provided witness and wrote up the announcement, which was then dutifully sent to every paper in town.

‘Is it really all electric now?’ Yuliang asks, gazing at the glittering skyline.

‘Like broad daylight at sunset.’

‘They must collect many taxes.’

‘Not as many as you might think. Foreigners don’t have to pay them.’

‘Really? Why not?’

‘Why did the Old Dragon give the French a hundred
and twenty million silver taels for a foreign temple?’ he asks, shrugging.

The boat bumps over the wake of a linked line of houseboats pulled by a huffing steamer tug. ‘Ah,’ the captain says. ‘Here they come.’ Clutching the seat for balance, Yuliang sees a horde of shouting beggars wading and poling their way toward them on ragged rafts. They swarm upon the sampan, reaching out, plucking sleeves. One woman, her face less a face than thin copper skin stretched over a skull, thrusts a bundle into Yuliang’s face. It takes a moment to make sense of the small, frayed heap. ‘Please, two cash for my sick child!’ the woman cries. ‘My milk is gone, dried up like dust. Please, two cash, for my daughter!’

The girl’s eyes are shut, fly-crusted. Yuliang claps her mouth shut against an overpowering stench – urine, rot, old blood. But something in the sight of it – the thin arms twined so firmly around the tiny body – stirs her. Without a word, she reaches for her purse.

‘Don’t,’ Zanhua says.

She turns, startled. ‘Why not?’

‘She’ll just give it to her beggar king. Who’ll spend it on opium. Or worse.’

‘But the child…’

‘Look closer. It’s not even alive.’

He is right: in an instant sympathy shifts to revulsion. Yuliang almost gags, as much at the sight of it as at the outrage. At least, she thinks weakly, Wuhu beggars are simply honest, poor people: monks, peasants fleeing famine and drought in the north. While this –
this
is something truly scandalous.

Still, while Zanhua tends to the bags, she holds out two coins. Breathing through her nose, Yuliang leans in. ‘Bury her,’ she whispers shortly. ‘If you loved her even slightly, leave her.’

The woman’s bloodshot eyes fix on Yuliang’s briefly. They reflect neither gratitude nor recognition of the act. She merely snatches the coins, tucks them into some hidden, ragged pocket. Then she’s off to another approaching sampan, her morbid bundle held aloft.

The new home of Pan Yuliang, the new ‘little wife’ of Pan Zanhua, is on Haiying Li, a shabbily genteel thoroughfare that unrolls just beyond what was once the Walled City’s northern gate. The wall is gone now, pulled down by Republican soldiers in an effort to unify the old Shanghai with the new. Still, turning into the warm shadows of the neighborhood, Yuliang feels as though she’s found sanctuary. After all the harsh glass, brick, and metal, the endless construction of the new Shanghai, the weathered wood and cool shadows are like a balm. Their rickshaw runners trot past old men smoking long-stemmed pipes, or strolling with elaborately carved birdcages in hand. Grandmothers squat and perch on stools in the shade of their courtyard walls, mending, smoking, exchanging gossip. Students stroll in silk gowns paired with Western trousers, wingtip shoes. A number of them huddle by a dingy doorway covered with posters and lined with stacks of tied newspaper. Yuliang reads the sign over the door with surprise. ‘
New Youth
? Isn’t that your friend’s magazine?’

Zanhua nods. ‘That’s the headquarters. Duxiu is back in Japan for the moment. But my friend Meng Qihua – the
one who met us at the pier – contributes photographs to it every now and then.’ He waves an arm at the rickshaw ahead of theirs.

‘Does he know the
New Youth
artists?’ she asks. At her request, Zanhua now buys her most
New Youth
issues, voicing approval of her interest in current affairs. What he doesn’t know is that she rarely makes it through a single article. What she mostly studies is the illustrations – particularly those bearing the still-indecipherable chop she’d first seen, beneath the two hands clasped across the earth.

‘I’d assume so,’ he replies absently. And then: ‘Ah. We’re here.’

His friend Qihua’s rickshaw has stopped before an old house, its dark wood silvered with years and smoke. ‘I’m sorry,’ the photographer calls back. ‘It’s a poor excuse for a home.’

And indeed, the little villa is a far cry from Zanhua’s Western-influenced house in Wuhu. It’s small and worn, and the hallway floorboards squeak sweetly, like small birds. The windows are papered, not glassed. But Yuliang, trailing in after Zanhua while Qihua walks around to check the outhouse, finds this unexpectedly pleasing. She’s forgotten how rice paper mutes the light, and eases life’s harsher lines and shadows.

Running a finger over a sill, Zanhua examines his fingertip with disapproval. ‘I’d hoped for something more modern.’

‘It’s more than I require,’ Yuliang assures him, taking a brief assessment before moving on to inspect the second floor. It is narrow, with two small bedrooms, a bathroom,
and a closet. The bathtub has a modern faucet but clearly no pipes attached to it as it doesn’t let loose any water when she turns it. The bedroom door sticks at first, but finally relents under her slight weight. Beyond it lies a sunny space with a full-sized bed by the wall.

Hot from her efforts, Yuliang unlatches the shutters and leans out. To the east lies the ornate roof of the Temple of the Wealth God; to the west, the iron cross of the London Mission, its shadow stretched by the pink-ringed sunset over the city.

Breathing deeply, Yuliang thinks:
I’m alone.
It’s surprisingly liberating. Not because she doesn’t love her new husband, but after three days together in close quarters, she’s looking forward to having her own thoughts again…

‘Yuliang?’ Zanhua calls up to her. ‘Are you there?’

Sighing, Yuliang pulls herself from the gold-tinged view. ‘I’m coming.’

When she arrives downstairs, he’s standing inside a little room she hadn’t noticed – a tiny, light-filled space. It takes her a moment to understand what is different: inexplicably, it has the home’s only glass window.

‘What’s this?’ she asks, pushing past him.

‘Maid’s room,’ Zanhua replies. ‘As dirty as the rest.’

It is dirty: even the window is painted over, with soot inside and bird droppings without. Scattered on the floor, beneath a layer of dust, are clothespins and hemp ropes from someone’s laundry, their pale forms embellished by dotted trails left by mice or roaches or some other scuttling creatures. Still, Yuliang’s first thought is:
Perfect.
Here she can truly lose herself, not just in the meticulous and increasingly difficult characters she has worked her way
up to, but in the work that is slowly becoming as, if not more, important: her sketching.

‘There’s no
k’ang
,’ Zanhua is saying. ‘But the girl should be warm enough. She can stay here as late as the Weeks of the White Dew, or even the autumnal equinox. After that she can move to the kitchen.’

‘What girl?’

‘The servant,’ he says, as though it should be obvious.

‘I don’t need a servant.’

‘You can’t plan on managing the house for yourself.’

‘I’ve done it before.’

Zanhua’s jaw tightens. ‘You did many things
before
. Now you are my wife. And my wife doesn’t clean or cook.’

‘You mean wives,’ Yuliang snaps back, though seeing him deflate she quickly regrets her words. ‘It’s a small house,’ she says, more gently.